Vance Says He Wanted Jan. 6 To Last For Weeks

Last updated: 2024/09/11 at 12:47 AM

Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) went all in this week on Trump’s effort to reverse his loss in the 2020 election.

In a video appearance on the All In podcast, Vance was asked whether he would have done what Mike Pence wouldn’t: refuse to certify the 2020 election.

“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of election we had,” Vance replied.

This response, which sounds extremely lawyerly, is of course an allusion to a key component of Trump’s bid to steal a second term.

And at a certain point, this answer isn’t surprising, though the fake elector plan has been the subject of criminal investigation in several states. Vance knows what happened to Pence; he effectively signed up for at least saying he’d do what Pence wouldn’t the moment he accepted the offer to be Trump’s running mate.

What’s more interesting is Vance’s justification that the fake electors plan would have allowed a “debate” to happen. In reality, by January 2021, the debate was long over: dozens of federal courts had thrown out ever-changing, chimerical claims of voter fraud, depriving the Trump campaign of a means to win.

But the idea that the Vice President could have turned Congress into a venue of last resort to “debate” the issue is the exact argument that Ken Chesebro, the Trump attorney and architect of the fake elector scheme, laid out in dozens of private emails from the time that I obtained earlier this year.

In Chesebro’s thinking, the Vice President refusing to certify would have indeed sparked a “debate” over election fraud. But blowing through January 6 would have masked what was really going on: Miring Congress in a “debate” about claims that everyone knew to be false would have demonstrated that Congress was “unable to act unless either the Court or the state legislature addresses claims re the state,” Chesebro wrote in one message.

It was a brazen power play. Congress’ inability to function, Trump’s lawyers theorized, would have pressured what Chesebro saw as the last Constitutional actor standing — the Supreme Court — to intervene. The conservative majority would have then, theoretically, decided the election for Trump. That’s the debate we’re talking about.